In early 2011 the Ensemble Project developed a resource for Liverpool John Moore’s Centre for Education & Early Childhood Studies. It is presented here, deconstructed into various stages of development, to reveal the journey it took from humble beginning as a twinkle in the eye of a Microsoft Excel worksheet, to a rich (and easily expandable) Semantic Web resource for students and educators alike.
This site contains no JavaScript cleverness (other than that provided by the standard Exhibit toolkit), no behind-the-scenes hacking, no digital sleight of hand: all that’s required to build these pages is a little knowledge of HTML, a basic grasp of web stylesheets, and some practice with Exhibit.
Before proceeding, it is recommended you spend a few minutes playing with the finished article; note the navigation links near the top of each page, for accessing different semantic views of the data.
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Step 1
The initial spreadsheets: we start with a handful of basic data tables, each containing rows that detail different types of data (philosophers, sessions, readings…), linked to provide semantic associations.
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Step 2
The ‘people’ spreadsheet run through Babel: to work with the data we first need to change it from spreadsheets into a record format your web browser can understand. The SIMILE project (home to Exhibit) hosts an online service to do just that: Babel. The service can also create very crude mock-up Exhibits from the spreadsheets we feed it — this is a useful tool for visually checking the correctness of our data, before we start working it up into a full Exhibit ourselves. (Note: this is a “Save As” snapshot of the page Babel produced, to get a working version try feeding the ‘people’ spreadsheet through Babel yourself.)
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Step 3
The ‘themes’ page as a skeleton Exhibit: once we have the data from Babel as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation — a data file format often used by web applications), we can start building our Semantic Web site. The first step is to throw up a view and a few facets, to check our data is fit for purpose.
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Step 4
The ‘themes’ page with proper lenses: if we’re happy with the skeleton, we can develop it further using lots of Exhibit goodness, like HTML lenses to control how each record is shown.
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Step 5
The final site: the great thing about semantic data is, as long as it has plenty of solid connections to link different records, it can be viewed and manipulated in many different ways. In the final site we used the same data sets over and over to drive several learning resources, all of them created using the same Exhibit tools.
